His commitment to “political architecture” led him to creating the Office for Political Innovation in 2003, which is an institution which studies the role of this art in the building of societies.

In 2016, he was given the Friederick Kiesler award for Architecture and Art because of his aesthetic combination and his theory of correlated arts.

COSMO, his movable architectural artefact was showcased at the MoMA in New York after he had won the Young Architects Program. We are dealing with an outdoor installation with which 11.300 litres of contaminated water become purified and drinkable in 10 days.

Andrés Jaque (born in Madrid in 1971) understands politics as that political beef which has an influence on both group identity and the building of cities. His work, far from the common places and all that is predefined by regulations, searches for responses to the great questions of mankind.

For him and the members that make up the Office for Political Innovation, the organisation that he himself founded in 2003 to search for new building solutions linked to the new group story: architecture has been thought up to be an anthropological discipline. A point of view which will have its place at the 12th PORCELANOSA Grupo Awards, since he will be on the jury itself.

With “architecture is society represented” as his motto, the humanist outlook which Jaque has about his job has allowed him to be positioned as a leading figure in critical architectural thinking. An artistic trend which, according to him, has to activelytake part in both people’s lives and rights. An idea he went for at the MoMA in New York through the Ikea Disobedients, an initiative which had citizens’ everyday habits analysed in order to show that relationship which society has with architecture.

The aforementioned commitment started at the Technical High School of Architecture in Madrid (ETSAM), where he got his degree as an architect in 1988. It was in that year where he was given the Tessenow Stipendiat de la Alfred Toepfer Stiftung FVS, an award which gave him the opportunity to move from Berlin to Dresden in order to improve both his outlook and his drawing.

A pioneer of ‘political architecture’

His research on the shortages and necessities of the new cities led to him setting up his own studio in 2000. With Andrés Jaque Arquitectos, he suggests a new way of understanding and conceiving architecture with man as the beginning and the end. This philosophical study on human beings led him to creating the Office for Political Innovation in 2003, a space of artistic, cultural and political reflection where contemporary architecture agreements are rewritten.

Committed to sustainability and the balance of the planet, his work is intended to sort out the problems of citizenship through a new urban order. That was the starting point from which COSMOS began, a “movable architectural artefact”, as he himself once defined, which portrayed the political measures carried out by the then Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, with regard to sewage. In order to eradicate water and housing privatisation, Jaque created this water treatment machine which could turn 11.300 litres of contaminated water into drinking water over a 10-day period. A system intended to “bring water infrastructures to architecture in New York City” which suggested a public system for water treatment.

An initiative which he explained at the MoMA after he had won the Young Architects Program at the MoMa PS1 in New York.

According to Jaque, cities have to be like spaces for hospitality. It is in them where citizens have to make moderate use of the material and energy goods which they have available, and buildings and locations have to be adapted to the natural environment that they are a part of. The premise with which he developed the Casas Tupper, an architecture response to official urbanism where housings are structured according to the technological range and space optimisation.

Awards and recognitions

The architect’s ideas and projects have picked up several awards. It was in 2014 when his Sales Oddity, Milano 2 and the Politics of Direct-to-home TV Urbanism design won the Silver Lion for the Best Project and Research at the 14th Architecture Biennale in Venice. He was also awarded with the 10th Frederick Kiesler prize, the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung’s Tessenow Stipendiat, the Dionisio Hernández Gil prize and the Architectural Record’s Designer of the Year award.

In relation to his professional career and his thinking side, we highlight his teaching activity. His academic records show his experience working as a professor at: SOA Princeton University in New Jersey; ETSAM (High School of Architecture in Madrid-UPM in Madrid); Alicante University (UA); the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem and the School of Architecture at Princeton University, where he worked as visiting professor. Furthermore, he has lectured extensively in universities, such as: MIT in Boston, Harvard GSD, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich, the Polytechnic Institute in Milan, the International Centre pour la Ville in Paris, the Centre pour l’Architecture et le Paysage in Brussels, the Central Society of Architects in Buenos Aires, the National Museum of Bogotá and the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam.

Jaque’s work has been exhibited at: MoMA, the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, La Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris, the Art Museum in Tel Aviv, the Architecture Triennale in Lisbon, the Architecture Biennale in Chicago or the Museum of Design in London.